Word: plastics
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...American?" A woman with sable hair smoothed back from her pointed, little face peered at me accusingly from above. Somewhat taken aback by her piercing eyes and aggressive stance, I remained silent, pressed against the back of my plastic chair. As if reaching an irrevocable decision, she sighed and said again, "You are an American...
...look a little closer at the work of researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack, you'd see their robot creation isn't ready yet to rule the universe. Even compared with other robots, it's primitive: using only four basic parts--plastic cylinders and ball joints, simple circuitry and small motors, along with rules for friction and gravity--it designed little self-propelled crawlers, like the toddler's insect...
Other scientists have created similar robots in their computers, to say nothing of systems intelligent enough to play championship chess, but Pollack and Lipson took a giant step out of the virtual world. After they hooked their computer to a $50,000 commercial plastic model-making machine, it produced actual offspring, not just a model on a computer screen. The only human intervention was installing the robot's little motor and computer-programmed microchip ("neurons...
...These days, as far as I can tell, kids have pretty much given themselves over to the plastic brand of lunchboxes or perennial paper bags - and that seems like a real shame. Where is the thrill in dragging a plastic lunchbox down the slats of a wooden fence? What kind of temper tantrums can a kid throw if the only thing she has to hurl down a flight of stairs is a brown paper bag lunch...
...Cube, landing this month in a computer store near you, is an 8-in. block of brushed steel encased in transparent, light-catching plastic. With silver wires feeding it from beneath, it looks like a floating digital brain, and certainly qualifies as an objet d'art. When I wasn't gawking at my test model, I was groping it. I had to pluck the motherboard-and-hard-drive core from its housing just to make sure there weren't any dilithium crystals hidden within (instant disassembly is one of the Cube's neater features...